From Consumer to Maker of Things

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Something profound happened to me recently. It’s an event which I think any maker experiences. It’s when one recognises that it’s more fun to be a maker than it is to be a consumer.

I’m not entirely sure when or why it happened. It could be that my cynical self is fighting back against the explosion of bullshit in the form of reality TV shows, unoriginal movies and software that’s conspiring against me. It could be my way of trying to create interesting news to fight back against the noise on HN and reddit feeds. Who knows…

I have to wade through so much junk before I find the gold these days. It used to be the case that news feeds were enjoyable to read. But these days, I’m finding that I can only find entertainment in what I do.

I can hardly stomach podcasts these days too, as I seem to be recognising that it’s often a one way conversation. Sometimes I wonder if my opinions and interests are even my own…

This sort of thing is a real problem for those tuning in to the radio, reading newspapers and watching morning breakfast programs. You wake up, get a shot of advertising and opinions that aren’t your own and then you then head off to your 9-5 job subconsciously effected by those opinions.

This is not how I want to live my life.

So I make things now. Perhaps it’s an attempt to escape the madness and feebly try to create the world that I would like to live in? Perhaps it’s because I’m seeking karma? Perhaps it’s because I’m seeking fame?

Who knows…

One thing I know for sure however is that it feels great to be a maker and when people comment positively on my work, it makes the effort all the more worth it :-)

Late To The Sping Cleaning Party…

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I guess it’s this time of year when folks consider spring cleaning. For me, that means re-jigging social networking accounts, turning off unwanted mailing lists and removing old RSS feeds from my reader.

It’s also a time where I generally audit my filesystems; removing junk data and trying my best to keep things to a minimum. After all, why spend time and disk space backing up data you no longer need? And yes, I’m very familiar with backup systems that generally dump once and then maintain changes, but there’s still a lot of unwanted data there that’s being searched and indexed.

On the social media front, I think tweeting about the Pi recently has brought in a lot of followers which I began to follow in return because it was polite to do so. I’ve realised that this was a bad decision given the wave of noise that now flows through my desktop notification system every 15 minutes. It’s distracting and sometimes offensive, so a lot of it has to go.

I think the bookshelf is due for a clean-up too. I’ve spent much time gathering vintage programming books over the years because I thought for reasons of history it would be fun to try and emulate what people experienced in the eighteees with “micro-computers”. It hasn’t worked out as I had planned so I’ll be shifting them soon, perhaps to a local computing museum if they’re willing to take them on. Whatever happens, they will not be recycled in the destruction sense.

Besides, my generation now has the Raspberry Pi to think about. So I think I should focus on the future and do everything there is to do with this awesome device.

I guess the final point to make in this post is that I’m having second thoughts again about the value this blog brings to the web. I’m thinking of archiving it and launching a couple of static HTML5 pages at stevepdp.org which simply link to stuff I’ve done.

Let me know your thoughts :-)

DMG-01 Modifications for LSDJ

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Now We’re Off To The Fantasy Zone… GET READY!

I mentioned in the last post that I had been spending some time modifying a DMG-01 Gameboy for use with LSDJ.

Well, today I more or less finished the modification by adding a 1/8″ “prosound” audio jack. This will allow me to record crystal clear music and sound effects for use in a hobby game I’m working on. See above for clues…

I’ve uploaded a video to YouTube showing the modifications. If for any reason the video doesn’t run, please download the copy hosted here.

Let me know what you think!

Some Updates

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I’ve had very little time to myself over the past four weeks due to work commitments and some decorating, but things have finally calmed down a bit and I’m back on track with a new space and some projects in mind which I’ll be executing over my long break next week.

My Raspberry Pi arrived a few weeks ago, and has been set up in a dedicated spot for evening hacking. So far, I’ve spent some time with Scratch and Python, and just yesterday I had the Quake 3 demo running thanks to hexxeh’s binaries. I’ve got a copy of Quake 3 Gold coming in the mail shortly, so I’m looking forward to spending some time with the #raspberrypi Quake folks.

The Pi has been on a brief tour too. For the past two weeks I’ve been demonstrating it at Mac’s Computer Club where we’ve played with a multimetre, the Snake demo and games from the Debian repo. Frozen Bubble ran surprisingly well despite the current lack of 3D acceleration in X11, and I’m hoping to see prettier games such as Titanion running well in the future. I suspect that a more feature reduced Debian or an Arch base installation might help things along in the short term. I’ve shown the Pi to some colleagues at work too, and we’re hoping to use it in an poetry gallery project sometime soon. I’ll likely be taking it to the next ALUG and 2600 meetings too if the regulars haven’t received their boards already.

In other news, I’ve been researching chiptune music production for a long-term Raspberry Pi project I’ve been thinking about. LSDJ is the software I’ll be using with my yellow “Play It Loud” DMG-01 Gameboy which I’m currently modifying. So far I’ve fitted an ASM Retro white 90 degree backlight and the front LCD protector has been replaced with a “Chiptune in Stereo” custom protector. I have the kit required to “pro-sound” it too which I’m hoping to do this week.

So there’s much to do, and I suspect you’ll be hearing a lot more from me soon what with all the free time I have now ;-)